


The Knight Caller

by Sheffield



Series: Knight's Tales [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Post-Reichenbach, Pre-Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 17:22:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4843925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry Knight was a brave man.  When someone came calling for help in the middle of the night, he would do what he could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Knight Caller

Henry Knight woke up, heart pounding. No... no... be here, now: in your own bedroom, safe, alone. Safe. Only dark because it was the middle of the night. He went through the calming exercise his therapist had taught him, reaching out for something external to himself to ground him by switching on the light. 3am. What had woken him?

It happened again. His mobile phone, sitting on his bedside table, in its charger, was ringing. Who RINGs a mobile phone? At 3am?

“Hello?” he said. The caller had rung off, but after a second or two the phone chimed with the familiar sound of an incoming text message.

It read: “Henry, I need your help.”

It was John Watson’s number. 

Henry sat up, pulled on a dressing gown and slippers. “What do you need?” he texted back. He hadn’t seen John Watson since... Sherlock’s funeral. When the doctor had been rigid with tension and grief, going through the motions but with nothing there behind the eyes. Henry had shaken his hand and given him his card, asked him to call if there was ever anything he could do to help. It had been, what, eighteen months, and this was the first time he’d heard from the ex-army doctor.

His phone chimed again. The text read “I’m downstairs. May I come in? Please?”

Henry stood up and went through the house to the kitchen, the only concession to his experiences with the Hound that he turned on every light as he passed it. He reached his kitchen and there, outside on the garishly lit patio, in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, stood, not John Watson at all. But. Sherlock Holmes.

He didn’t pass out. He grasped the edge of the kitchen counter. There, solid, granite, real. Three am in his own kitchen: no ghosts. He was awake, he was sure, and not drugged, he was certain. And, outside his kitchen doors, a dead man, walking.

Henry Knight was a brave man. He opened the doors and said quietly, “Sherlock. Come in. I’ll get you a towel.”

***

Henry Knight was a brave man, Sherlock thought. The little trick with the text messages, making it look like the text was from John’s number, had been worth it. He’d been reasonably sure Henry would respond, and that being in his own house would be enough to ground him. The therapist John had found him was, after all, rather good, judging from the state of his pyjama turn-ups and the quantity of peaches in the fruit bowl on the counter.

It had been a calculated risk coming here: he needed someone who would have the resources to help him but wasn’t on the radar of either Moriarty’s operation or of Mycroft’s. There was an infiltrator in Mycroft’s closest team, or at least he had to believe that or believe that Mycroft had decided to pull the plug on him and leave him to the East Wind. Most people who owed him favours were people for whom he’d solved mysteries. Finding one who was far enough outside of London not to attract attention, but who also had the resources he needed... Henry was a good bet.  
“What. Are you... Doing Here, Sherlock?” He was making tea even while he was struggling to speak. Curious, Sherlock thought. One day he must write a monograph on the automatic tendency of the English male to make tea at moments of supposed crisis and the persistence of the tendency whatever the emotional turmoil.

“I’m not dead. As you can see.”

Henry put the mug of tea in front of him with a contemptuous crash that slopped some onto the counter. Sherlock gave up rubbing his hair dry on the towel and said “Well, yes, I admit that was rather obvious. I had to fake my own death in order to save John, Inspector Lestrade and my landlady Mrs Hudson from Moriarty’s snipers. I've been taking down what's left of Moriarty's network, but it's proving a rather more complex task than I'd envisaged. You can’t tell John, as the only thing keeping him safe is that it’s obvious to any observer that he believes I’m dead.”

“Obvious? Have you SEEN him, Sherlock?”

Tedious.

“It would hardly be condusive of keeping my continued existence a secret...”

Actually, it occurred to him, he should probably have sought Henry’s help perhaps 48 hours ago, when they could have bandaged and disinfected the wound on his arm before the infection set in. Or 24 hours ago when he could have given in to the needs of his transport for food. And water...

Sherlock was conscious that the world was displaying an unpleasant tendency to slide eccentrically sideways and it took his wounded arm smacking onto the floor before he worked out that it was in fact he who was falling...

***

Sherlock slid so gracefully off the breakfast bar stool that Henry almost missed what was happening until his unexpected visitor was lying prostrate and unconscious. No obvious head wound, breathing seemed OK. Sherlock was wearing an army greatcoat, not unlike the famous coat he wore in all the pictures, although underneath it he wore jeans and a hoodie rather than the smart suits Henry recalled. However for practical purposes the greatcoat made a rather good travois, and Henry was proud of himself for the way he managed to grasp Sherlock by the back of the greatcoat neck and simply slide him through the kitchen, down the hall and into the downstairs study where the sofa pulled out into a spare bed. He pulled it out, tugged Sherlock’s limp form up onto the mattress and pulled off his sodden shoes. He put his fingers on Sherlock’s neck and felt his pulse. Seemed OK. Sherlock was soaked through from the rain. 

“Sherlock!” he said. “I’m going to get you out of those wet things, OK?”

No response. Henry fetched more towels from the downstairs bathroom and draped them over his patient’s form. He unbuttoned Sherlock’s shirt and removed it, and found a foul bandage round his arm. Briskly he towelled Sherlock’s torso dry and covered him up with more dry towels. He was almost inclined to leave the lower half alone, but Sherlock was so wet and so cold... and was he injured anywhere else?

“Sherlock?” he asked again. No response. Should he perhaps be calling an ambulance instead? But then Sherlock was pretending to be dead, he reasoned, and putting him into the NHS machine could only end with his identity coming out and then what would happen?

He efficiently stripped Sherlock down to his boxers, dried his legs and feet and, relieved not to find any more injuries, again covered him up with dry towels. He fetched a spare duvet to replace the towels and then nerved himself to deal with the wound.

He peeled off the filthy dressing and gagged at the smell. Infection, then. He fetched hot water and disinfectant, antiseptic ointment and a clean dressing and did what he could to clean and re-dress the wound. Sherlock was still either unconscious or asleep. Reflexively, he went and made some more tea.

“Sherlock?” he said again, more tentatively. This time his patient’s eyes opened. “Drink some of this” he said.

He held Sherlock’s head up while he drank thirstily. No ambulance then, he said to himself.

“Thanks John,” Sherlock said wearily.   
“Henry...” he said gently. But Sherlock was already asleep.

***

Sherlock woke with no idea where he was. He kept his eyes closed while he tried to reassemble his scattered wits. Not restrained, not cold, not wet. Bed - small, relatively uncomfortable, probably a rarely-used sofabed - but covered with a king size high tog value duvet in a percale cotton cover.

Safe? Relatively, anyway.

He opened his eyes and saw Henry Knight, watching him from an office chair six feet away.

“Afternoon, sleepy-head.”  
“Afternoon?”  
“You’ve been asleep around thirteen hours: it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. Here. Take these.”

Sherlock looked suspiciously at the two capsules.

“You have no idea how hard it is to persuade the NHS to prescribe antibiotics for someone else’s infected wound when you can’t tell them that’s who or what they’re for and all you have to go on is several hours work googling symptoms. I had to fake walking pneumonia. Over the phone! And persuade the surgery to release the prescription to a taxi driver, the taxi driver to take it to a pharmacy, and the pharmacy to release it to the taxi driver. AND I had to pay him double what was on the clock!”

Sherlock took the capsules, and at the same time drank a good litre and a half of the luke warm water from the bedside jug and glass set.

“I’m impressed” he said. “I was going to borrow a ladder and break in and steal them.”  
“Much simpler,” Henry agreed, “but what were you going to do when you fell off the top of the ladder and broke your neck? If you don’t mind my asking, that is?”

Sherlock’s lip twitched and he saw the same movement in Henry, and in a moment they were giggling together like... like he and John giggled at crime scenes, sometimes.

He had always worked alone. He had never realised he was lonely, till suddenly he wasn’t. Being back there was worse than never having known what it was like.

“Hey, it’s OK,” Henry was saying absurdly. Why was he sitting on the edge of the bed? What was that piece of cloth... handkerchief, his brain supplied. Why would he need a handkerchief?

Were those tears?

“Here, drink this.”  
It was soup, in a cup. He realised, all at once, that he was ravenous. After one cautious sip he drank the rest in one continuous slurp and then passed the cup back.

“I didn’t have you down as a gourmet cook?”   
Henry blushed.  
“Yes, well: once I stopped being a victim I needed a hobby.”

They were laughing again.

 

It had been worth it, then. If antiseptic ointment and the antibiotics got the infection under control, Sherlock wouldn't need to go to hospital. He'd done it! It was rare enough for him to feel a sense of accomplishment, but he felt he'd shown… grit. And nous. Shame he wouldn't be able to share the story with his therapist but, still.

Sherlock had slept most of the day and Henry, after carefully reassuring himself about Sherlock's symptoms on the NHS website and setting repeating alarms on his phone for the antibiotics, finally had to give in to his own need for sleep. He went upstairs, took a quick shower, and then strolled, naked, rubbing his hair with a towel, into his bedroom…

…where Sherlock was asleep on his bed.

"Sherlock. You… How… But you were…"

Apparently teleporting yourself into the more comfortable bed whilst unconscious was a symptom he hadn't googled. Sherlock opened one eye. "Problem?" he said casually.

"You… Aren't you and… I mean…"  
"Yes. And, we haven't. Yet. And… it's been a long time."

Henry Knight was a brave man. He turned out the light and climbed into bed.


End file.
